Monday, June 24, 2013

You are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old...you are not thirteen years old. You can't be.

You are. That little baby in the photo. And I love you more than anything in the whole wide world.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

So
listen up. If you’ve read my drivel for any length of time you might remember
the randomanalia posts. Well really--all of them are random to a great degree but I
used to pile on a huge load of irreleventia from time to time when I didn’t
have the focus for a vaguely more cogent yarn. 2013 has seen me thus far mired
in a zero bandwidth and nil focus stew pot when it comes to telling stories so
I figured I’d drop a poorly edited pile on y’all this morning.

This was
desert. Last night. Desert last night at the home of a guy who like me, has a
delightful daughter and an affection for Alden shoes. He also has a lovely wife
and a really cool son. Oh, and a network of eclectic, smart, grounded and
delightful friends. A gaggle of whom shared in the fellowship with my dinner
hosts last night. I’d never met face-to-face my Alden pal till last night. We’ve
threatened to have a drink together for a year now but you know how it goes.
Life is busy. But I was determined to not let anything get in the way of last
night’s dinner invitation from Alden Guy.

So why
do I share this? Because most of the reasons I continue to blog are the reasons
I did so in the first place and they are predominantly superficial. But there’s
also been an anything but superficial result of this blog. I’ve met some really
great people and I’m gratified to know that some of them will be lifelong
friends... the kind of friends who will take your call at 3am if you need them.
I’d like to think that I’d do the same for them. Ask Toad.

My
blessed but manic life isn’t special. My joys and challenges can easily be
trumped by others who are also trying to navigate their day-to-day journeys
with gratitude and sanity. But the odyssey of my mom’s illness is one for the
record books and as I’ve said before, I will write about it somewhere—but not
here. I know way too much about healthcare to just accept some of the shit that
has been passed off as the care continuum for geriatric chronic disease and end
of life management. My humble advice to you is if you have a family member who
is deeply mired in this goat rodeo of a healthcare system we have in the States,
you better find an informed advocate to question every damn thing done for you
beloved. This saga has wrung me and my sibs out...emotionally, physically and, if we had any, intellectually.

On a
happier note, my mom is lucid, cogent and fighting daily to get well enough to
go home. It is amazing to see and we hold no false hope about how long we may
have her. And if she can get home for even a few months—with daily nursing care—it
will be fantastic. All I know is that if she dies tomorrow, the recent moments
that I’ve had with her…moments where she and I have been able to once again
have reflective, tender and deep conversations are gifts of inestimable value.
Why? Because in March we took her off the respirator so that she could die yet
now, she’s flipping the bird at the physical therapy people who are putting her
through rigorous paces. Life is rich. And I swear to God that till now, I never saw my mom flip anyone off. Ever. When I was growing up. Shut up.

So let’s
get to the superficial stuff. I’ve had two jackets awaiting a first fitting at
my man Puerto Rykken’s Paul Stuart atelier since last December. That’s how damn
crazy my world’s been. So last Tuesday I finally bit the bullet and did an
Amtrak up and back in the same day to get fitted as well as drop in on a couple
of other Gotham destinations. My go-to navy blazer is so ratty that I sorely
needed to replace it. Now I have other ones—my blazers see more action than
anything else in or out of my closet but my go-to sees the most combat. Instead
of replacing it identically, I opted for hacking pockets versus three open
patch. It’s gonna be strong. Trust me. Or not. I don’t give a damn ‘cause you
ain’t gonna be wearin’ it. Shut up.

And my
summer 2013 jacket, which based on the delay in getting it fitted, I’ll be able
to wear for maybe three weeks, is a linen-wool-silk contrivance that’s gonna be
sublime. The coloring is really gonna enhance my jaundice and the cut? Hugely
complimentary to my alcoholic malnourished attenuatiousness.

I'm going to write a story about Made-to-Measure, Custom and Bespoke processes and the differences. Don't ask me when I'll get around to it. I have no idea. But I can tell you unequivocally that what my man Rykken is doing for me over at Paul Stuart is anything but some demi-ass MTM sleight of hand. It's as close to Savile Row paper pattern cutting as I'll ever need.

So after
my Rykken fitting and before the train slog home, I dropped in on the Belgian
Mother Church to see what, if anything was new. And I defined new as a pair of
monochromatic calfskin navies. And I ordered another monochromatic-contrivance
that’ll be here probably around Labor Day if I’m lucky. Stay tuned. Or not.

Oh, and
thanks to those over at my tumblr who helped me select that next round of kilim
slips from Pammie-Jane over at Nomad Ideas. Typically, I ignored the feedback
of the majority and did my own thang. And these thangs I like.

Anyone care to guess what trad purveyor occupied this space for years? I passed it in midtown last week and once again had that pang of regret for having missed their salad days. Hint? "GTH Mother Church."

Let me
close this out with an update on one L. F. G. She finished the school year having made
nothing less than all A’s. She’s becoming such a lovely young adult and it’s
killing me every step of the way. Y’all told me it was typical-predictable-boilerplate
and text book. But I still don’t have to like it.

But I
know she loves me. The latest evidence includes her agreement to take me to the
Toy Soldier Shop in D.C. and select my Father’s Day present(s).

She
squealed with glee when she was younger as I’d sit on the front steps of the
shop while she and Mister Neil narrowed down my broad choices and boxed and
wrapped them. This most recent round of “pick daddy’s present” was at least tolerated
with stoic elegance.

Ok. That’s
enough drivel for now. Onward.
Kinda. With two Brooks Brethren striped BDs that were on sale.

Friday, June 21, 2013

If my CasaMinimus was on fire, after I got Roxanne Burgess dressed
and out the door, one of the next things I’d grab and sling off the balcony
would be my cache of Apparel Arts books. The MSRP on those babies just keeps getting higher.

Oh, and I reckon the next thing I’d
grab would be my copy of that twee little distillation of a book that Woody
Hochswender wrote…Men in Style: The Golden Age of Fashion from Esquire. Reason
is that the little Woody book is going for close to three-hundred bucks! Crazy. Don't believe me, check for your damn self. I don't care. If anybody wants my Woody book, I'll sell it to you for two-fiddy. If ya just lookin' for woody, well.

Photo of SRS by my friend Rose Callahan of Dandy Portraits fame who has never bothered to take a photo of my dandified ass.

Well our man Sven Raphael Schneider has done all of us a favor by
creating a digital compilation of some of the best of the best of Apparel Arts
visual treats. Gentlemen of Style – Men’s Fashion Illustrations in the US in the
Thirties is Raphael’s eBook creation and it is hands down better than the Woody
book and the pdf costs you nothing.Here, I’ll let him tell you about it and you can go here to get it. Just
sign up for his newsletter and he’ll send you a link for downloading the eBook.

“Over the past weeks, we have published fewer articles because we
were working on our very first eBook – Gentlemen of Style. This book focuses on
men’s clothing in the US in the 1930′s as worn by elegant Gentleman using
Apparel Arts Fashion Illustrations from Fellows, Saalburg, Oxner, Hurd etc.

The goal of this book was to show the degree of elegance in men’s
clothing at the time, and to point out things that you may improve in your very
own outfits. Overall, I discussed more than 30 fashion illustrations from the
early 1930′s Apparel Arts magazines, most of which have never appeared online
anywhere.

Moreover, these illustrations are large unlike the tiny pics you
usually see. In combination with the commentary, it is more details than the book
Men in Style and features considerably more information about the golden age of
menswear the 1930′s.

Best of all, instead of spending $200 – 600 on Men in Style, my
book will be available exclusively to subscribers to the Gentleman’s Gazette
Newsletter for a limited time for free.”

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

A tumblr
follower asked… “Have you taken a gander
at the merchandise in the Vineyard Vines Georgetown store yet? What do you
think of the company's duds? It seems kind of expensive for stuff made in
China. Anything bear closer examination? (I realize that this question is
directed at a man that dropped $150 on a pair of shorts with polka dots that
were made in China. : ) )”

Obviously
I had more to say about Vineyard Vines than I thought…

“Damn
and Bam! You axked me a question and then you outed me on my capricious polka
purchase. One point of clarification—I waited till those shorts were 25% off.

I always
thought that Vineyard Vines was too “one seasonal” but they’ve seemed to thrive
and I’m all for anyone staying in business. I have, respectfully, corrected
those who’ve said those two boys are a rags to riches story similar to the guys
who started Nantucket Nectars. Not to take anything away from those guys but
they are from the Murray family and they had a huge kick-start—head
start—mentorship resource from the get-go. That aside, they are brilliant
merchants.

The
timing of your question is interesting. I just bought LFG a V.V. t-shirt the
other day and I didn’t look at the price till we got to the register. I didn’t
feel ripped off but I felt close to it. Bottom line for me is that even though
their stuff might be made all over the world, the quality seems to be pretty
good and the taste level is high. My bias says that the goods are better than
most of the garbage at their price point stuff that J. Crew offers—at least the
largest part of their offering.

However,
my thinking is that you can cherry pick the better spots of L.L. Bean and Orvis
for the representative amount of pastel resort-ish stuff that one needs and do
it for less dough. Dough that you may then capriciously spend on things like
Belgian shoes and women and toy soldiers and caricatures and martinis and…

Sunday, June 16, 2013

It's no secret that I've been looking for my father for over fifty years. So perhaps when you read this masterpiece from Tom Junod, it won't land on you the way it resonated with me. None the less, I want you to read it. It's lovely. And I want you to have a sublime Father's Day.

Onward. Making certain that LFG never has to search for her daddy.

ADG II

*I am posting this without permission from Tom Junod or GQ. I will immediately remove this post if there is an attribution or copyright concern.

MY FATHER’S
FASHION TIPS

By Tom Junod

As we celebrate fifty years of GQ, we look back at
some of the greatest writing the magazine has published. In 1996, in a piece
that was nominated for a National Magazine Award, Tom Junod wrote not only of
his dad’s impeccable style but also of the secrets—and underwear rules—of a
lost generation

GQ, December 1996

First
it was Lubriderm, what my father rubbed briskly between his palms and extended
in glistening offering. “How about a bit of the Lube?” he’d say when I walked
into his bathroom. I was, like, 8 years old, or something, so I had no choice
but to put my face in his shiny hands. Then, for a long time, it was Nivea.
“How would you like a little…Nivea?” he’d ask, with his brown hands
singing. Now it was baby oil. Now he was 77, and I was 38, and we were sharing
a room in a hotel near the ocean. He was sitting in bed, and I was sitting on
the floor. He poured the oil into his hands and whisked them together, with a
sigh of friction, and applied the oil to his face. Then he said, “Here—rub a
little baby oil into your kisser. If you want to stay young, you have to keep
well lubricated.”

”Baby
oil? What happened to Nivea?”

”Too
greasy. Baby oil soaks right in. It’s the best thing for a man’s face.”

He
held out the bottle. I held out my palm. “Good, good,” he said. “Rub it right
in—right in…”

*****

There
were always secrets. You could not walk into my father’s bathroom and not know
there were secrets. Secrets of grooming, secrets of hygiene, secrets of
preparation, secrets of the body itself—secrets and knowledge. First of all, he
had a bathroom all to himself—his bathroom, Dad’s bathroom. And he made it his,
by virtue of what he put in it—his lotions, his sprays, his unguents, his
astringents, his cleansers, his emollients, his creams, his gels, his
deodorants, his perfume (yes, he used perfume, my father did, as his scent—Jean
Naté eau de cologne—for he was, and is, as he will be the first to tell you, a pioneer,
as well as a fine-smelling man), his soaps, his shampoos and his collection of
black fine-tooth Ace combs, which for years I thought were custom-made, since
that was his, Lou Junod’s, nickname in the Army: Ace. He called these
things, this mysterious array of applications, his “toiletries” and took them
with him wherever he went, in a clanking case of soft beige leather made by the
Koret handbag company of New York, and wherever he went he used them to
colonize that bathroom, to make that bathroom his own, whether it
was in a hotel or someone’s house—because “I need a place to put my
toiletries.” He has always been zealous in his hygiene, joyous in his
ablutions, and if you want to know what I learned from him, what he taught me,
we might as well start there, with what he never had to say: that fashion
begins with the body, and has as much to do with your nakedness as it does with
your clothes; that style is the public face you put together in private, in
secret, behind a door all your own.

I have a sense of
style, I guess, but it is not like my father’s—it is not earned, and
consequently it is not unwavering, nor inerrant, nor overbearing, nor
constructed of equal parts maxim and stricture; it is not certain. It
does not start in the morning, when I wake up, and end only at night, when I go
to sleep. It is not my creation, nor does it create me; it is ancillary rather
than central. I don’t absolutely f’ing live it, is what I’m trying to
say. I don’t put it on every time I anoint myself with toilet water or
stretch a sock to my knee or squeeze into a pair of black bikini underwear.
Which is what my father did. Of course, when I was growing up, he tried as best
he could to teach me what he knew, to indoctrinate me—hell, he couldn’t
resist, for no man can be as sure as my father is without being also
relentlessly and reflexively prescriptive. He tried to pass on to me knowledge
that had the whiff of secrets, secrets at once intimate and arcane, such as the
time he taught me how to clean my navel with witch hazel. I was 18 and about to
go off to college, and so one day he summoned me into his bathroom. “Close the
door,” he said. “I have to ask you something.”

"What, Dad?”

”Do you…clean your
navel?”

“Uh, no,”

”Well, you should.
You’re a man now, and you sweat, and sweat can collect in your navel and
produce an odor that is very…offensive.” Then: “This is witch hazel. It
eliminates odors. This is a Q-Tip. To clean your navel, just dip the Q-Tip into
the witch hazel and then swab the Q-Tip around your navel. For about thirty
seconds. You don’t have to do it every day; just once a week or so.” He
demonstrated the technique on himself, then handed me my own Q-Tip.

”But Dad, who is going
to smell my navel?”

”You’re going off to
college, son. You’re going to meet women. You never want to risk turning them
off with an offensive odor.”

I never did it—or,
rather, I did it that one time and never again. I am a son who has squandered
his inheritance, you see; I am incomplete in my knowledge and practice of
matters hygienic and sartorial. And yet…I want to know, and that is why one
weekend late last summer I wound up staying with my father in a hotel room that
smelled of salt water and mildew, with his bag of toiletries spilling out on
the bed and a puddle of baby oil shimmering in my palm: for the blessing of his
instruction, for the privilege of his secrets. He had always told me that a man
is at the peak of his powers from his late thirties to his early fifties, when
he has forced the world to hear his footsteps—that a man comes into the peak of
his powers when he has power and the world at last bends to him.
He never told me, however, that that power can be measured by the number of
secrets a man knows and keeps, and that when it became my time to make
the world heed my step, I would want to know his secrets, for the
paradoxical purpose of safekeeping and promulgation. My father’s fashion tips:
I’d listened to them all my life, and now that I was finding myself living by
them, I wanted to tell them to the world, if only to understand where in the
hell he got them; if only to understand how someone like my father can come to know,
without a moment of hesitation or a speck of doubt, that the turtleneck is the
most flattering thing a man can wear.

1. The turtleneck is
the most flattering thing a man can wear.

This is axiomatic,
inflexible and enduring. This is an article of faith and, as we shall see, the
underpinning of a whole system of belief. Mention the word turtleneck to
any of my college roommates and they will say “the most flattering thing a man
can wear.” Mouth the phrase “the most flattering thing a man can wear” and they
will say “the turtleneck.” This is because my father was born to proselytize,
and when he and my mother visited my college and took me and my friends out to
dinner, he sought to convert to his cause not only me—as he has as long as I’ve
been alive—but them as well. Those who wore turtlenecks that evening were
commended; those who did not were instructed and cajoled. My father was
declamatory in the cause of turtlenecks, and as often as possible he wore them
himself. Indeed, this is my wife Janet’s first glimpse of Lou Junod: We have
sat next to each other, Janet and I, for five hours, as our bus bucked a
snowstorm and made its way from a college town in upstate New York to a mall
parking lot on Long Island. We have kissed, for the very first time, the night
before. We have held hands covertly the entire trip, although she has not yet
smelled my neglected navel. Our seats are in the back of the bus, and so we
have to wait a long time before we can get out. When we finally reach the
front, there is a man standing at the door. He is impatient. He is not standing
in the polite semicircle that the other parents have formed outside the bus;
indeed, he is trying to stick his face inside the bus, and so we have to
wait a long time before we can get out. He is, however, oblivious to whatever
confusion he causes, and his chin is held at an imperious tilt. Although snow
falls heavily behind him, he has a very dark tan, and his face shines with
steadfast lubrication. He is, by his own description, “not a handsome man, but
a very attractive one.” He has a strong face: a large nose with a slight hook;
thick eyebrows, nearly black; and eyes of pale, fiery green. He is about
five-ten and a half, or in his words, “six foot in shoes.” He is wearing a
leather windbreaker, unzipped, and a pair of beige pants, which he calls
“camel,” and a ribbed turtleneck, tight to his body and pale yellow. Over his
heart dangles a set of gold dog tags—his name is on them—and on his left pinkie
is a gold ring of diamond and black onyx. He does not wear a wedding band.
“Where is he?” he is saying, theatrically, with a habit of elaborate enunciation
that lingers lovingly upon every consonant. “Where is…my son?” Janet
looks at him and then at me and says, “That’s not…?” I look at him and say,
“Hi, Dad.”

Now, the turtleneck in
this scene may seem incidental—just another detail, in an accumulation of
detail—rather than an organizing principle. Don’t be fooled. Anytime my father
wears a turtleneck, he is advancing a cause, and the cause is himself. That is
what he means when he says that an article of clothing is “flattering.” That is
where his maxim extolling the turtleneck acquires its Euclidean certainty. The
turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear because it strips a man
down to himself—because it forces a man to project himself. The
turtleneck does not decorate, like at tie, or augment, like a
sport coat, or in any way distract from what my father calls a man’s
“presentation”; rather, it fixes a man in sharp relief and puts his face on a
pedestal—first literally, then figuratively. It is about isolation, the
turtleneck is; it is about essences and first causes; it is about the body and
the face, and that’s all it’s about; and when worn by Lou Junod, it is
about Lou Junod. The turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear,
then, because it establishes the very standard for flattery in fashion,
which is that nothing you wear should ever hide what you want to reveal, or
reveal what you want to hide. This is the certainty from which all the other
certainties proceed; this is why my father, never a religious man—indeed, a true
and irrepressible pagan, literal in his worship of the sun—believes in
turtlenecks more than he believes in God.

2. There is nothing
like a fresh burn.

I do not know exactly
what my father looks like, for I do not know what my father looks like without a
suntan. I have never seen him pale or even sallow. He does not often use the
word suntan, however because he has been going out in the sun for so
long that he has as many words for suntan as Eskimos have for snow. There is,
for instance, “color,” which he usually modifies with a diminutive and uses
almost exclusively to entice and encourage his three children—my brother, my
sister and me—to “go outside, stick your face in the sun and get a little
color.” There is also “glow,” which seems to mean the same thing as “color,”
but which requires less of a commitment—as in, “Just a half hour! Just a half
hour in the sun and you’ll get a little glow, and you’ll look and feel terrific.”
But neither a little glow nor a little color can substitute for the nearly
mystical properties of “a burn.” Indeed, a burn is such a powerful thing that
my father never asks his children to get one. A burn is such a powerful thing
that in order to get one for himself my father concocted, in his bathroom, a
tanning lotion of his own invention, composed of baby oil, iodine and peroxide
(a few years ago, he tried to improve upon it by adding a few drops of Jean
Naté, “for the scent,” and it exploded). A burn is such a powerful thing that
my father went to great lengths to make sure the sun shined on him, all
year round, and turned the world into his personal solarium. In November and
December, when he went out on the road for weeks at a time to make a living
selling handbags, he always ended his trip in Miami and stayed for a few extra
days at the Fontainebleau or the Jockey Club, so that when he finally came home
he would come home—and this is another of his Eskimo words—“black.” In January
and February, he would dress in ski pants and a winter coat, cover himself with
a blanket and sit for hours on the white marble steps that led to the front
door of our house on Long Island—steps that were built with their reflective
qualities in mind—with a foil reflector in his gloved hands and his oiled face
ablaze with winter light. (Me, freezing: “How’s the sun, Dad?” He, with tanning
goggles over his eyes: “Like fire.”) In March or April, there was
Florida again, or California, and in the summer there was our house in
Westhampton Beach, where my father indulged his paganism to its fullest extent;
where the ocean was “nectar of the gods”; where the black bikinis he usually
wore under his trousers he now wore to the beach; where the reflector now on
occasion surrounded his entire body, like some incandescent coffin; where the
sound track was my father singing “Summer Wind” and tinkling the ice in his
cocktails; where he wore straw fedoras and V-necked angora sweaters; where his
sense of style seemed to stretch all the way to the sunset and his burn was
forever fresh….

3. Always wear white
to the face.

It’s gone now, that
house—it’s a goner. The ocean took it away, years ago, and now wind and sand
blow through where it used to be, straight to the sea. I mean, there’s nothing
left—not even a spike of foundation, nor a snake of plumbing, nor a hank of
wiring…not even ruins, to mark, in shadow, my father’s empire of the sun.
That’s what we saw, when we drove out there last summer, my father and I, to
Westhampton Beach, to 879 Dune Road—that there was nothing at all left to see.
Still, we had to see it…and then we had to stay at a hotel called the Dune Deck
because, say what you will about the Dune Deck, it’s still standing. You have
to give it that. Its paint is faded, and the planks of its eponymous deck are
splintery and mossy, and its rooms smell like old water…but at least it is
extant and ongoing, this place where my father went to practice the art of
swank; where he took my beautiful mother, Fran for dinner; where he always
sported drinks for his pals; where the image I remember is him standing at the
bar with a gin and tonic, wearing white jeans—which he called “white ducks”—and
a sweater over a bare chest, whistling; where, in the summer, the great Teddy
Wilson, from the Benny Goodman Trio, played piano; and where, once upon a time,
my father stepped up to the mike to sing…at least it is still around,
this place where Lou Junod was a star.

A star, yes—that’s what
my father was, because that’s what he wanted to be…that’s all he wanted
to be. My father’s stardom was unusual in that he didn’t have to do
anything to be a star, even though being a star was what he worked at,
every day. For instance, my father was a singer without being a singer—without
being a pro. A crooner, my dad was, steeped in standards, with a voice
that—when it was on—could make you cry. He sang his way through World War II,
with an army big band, in a revue called “For Men Only,” after he was twice
wounded. He sang all over Europe. He sang in Paris. He sang in an afterhours
club with the great swinging gypsy, Django Reinhardt, as his accompanist. He
never really stopped singing, either, even when he came home, to my mother, to
Brooklyn and then Long Island, and then to us—he used to sing at clubs in New
York, at closing time. The Little Club, the Harwyn Club…Not for money—as far as
I know, my father never made a dime from his voice—but to put himself across.
And when he went to see Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis one night at the Copa and
Dino passed the microphone around to patrons and asked them to sing a verse, my
father was prepared: He took the microphone in hand and sang to such
effect that Dean Martin had to take it back. “Hey,” Dino said, his voice
whittled down to a point of low warning. “Hey,” he said, glaring at my
father over his shoulder, with a squint, with a glance of sudden, alarmed
appraisal, sparked by his knowledge that there was now another man in
the room, and to this man attention must be paid.

It
was this, more than anything else, that was the true measure of my father’s
stardom, especially in the absence of other, more reliable measures, such as
box-office returns or record sales or public acclaim: the response he elicited
from other stars. See, in my father’s stories—and my father is a man of many
stories—he has many encounters with celebrities, and each of them ends in the
exact same way: with the celebrity in some way recognizing my father,
with the celebrity finally having to take my father into account. If the
celebrity is a beautiful woman, she will inevitably end up being unable to
take her eyes off him, as in, “I saw Ava Gardner at Bill Miller’s Riviera,
with Sinatra, and she couldn’t take her eyes off your old man,” or, “Elizabeth
Taylor was there—she couldn’t stop flirting with your father. It started
getting embarrassing—embarrassing!” (My father, by the way, is swift and
aphoristic in judgment of his peers, and also unsentimental, so that Ava Gardner,
in addition to being a “big nympho,” was “shorter than I expected—nothing
much,” and Elizabeth Taylor was “short and dumpy, with a little bit of a
facial-hair problem.”) And if the celebrity is a man…well, then, he can’t his
eyes off my father, either, but his regard is sharper, much more complicated,
especially if he is something of a kinsman to my father—a fellow traveler—and
as such a potential rival, like Sinatra and Dean Martin. 1952: Sinatra
is at the Copa. Sinatra is, in my father’s words, “flat on his ass,” because of
Ava, the nympho. He is drinking, and his voice is gone. He makes a request. “
‘All or Nothing at All,’ ” he says. Sinatra shakes his head. “ ‘All…or
Nothing…at All,’ ” my father, commandingly, with his own exaggerated singer’s
diction. Sinatra touches his throat and looks at my father, imploringly,
pitiably. “Too tough,” he whispers, softly and hoarsely, before leaving the
stage. “Too tough.” 1957: My father goes to Vegas for the first time, in the
year before my birth. He rents a convertible and drives across the Arizona
desert with the top down, and by the time he gets there he is, well, black, and
of course, and vibrant with the pulse of the elements themselves. He goes to a
coffee shop, and Dean is there, and Dean recognizes him—a nod. And then
the next day, my father goes down to the casino, to play at the blackjack
table, and Dean walks over, tan like my father, but not of course as tan
as my father, and asks the dealer to step aside. “Let me deal to him,” Dean
says (or maybe, preferably, “Let me deal to him”), and for the next twenty
minutes that’s what he does—Dean Martin deals cards to Lou Junod. It’s just the
two of them, two men wearing suits and shirts with French cuffs at twelve
o’clock noon, in the middle of the freaking desert, and somewhere along the
line it must occur to them—well, at the very least, it occurs to my dad—that
they are men who very easily could have lived each other’s lives…which is why
my father always told me never to ask for autographs (“They should be asking
for your autograph”)…and which, I suppose, is why, thirty-eight years
later, when I was about to interview John Travolta, this was my father’s
advice: “Where are you staying? Do they have a pool? OK, this is what you
do—listen to your father: This afternoon you go to the pool, and you get
some goggles to cover your eyes, and you put your face in the sun, and tomorrow
you wear white to the face and a nice tie and you show John Travolta how
good-looking you are.”

Ah
yes, of course—wear white to the face. A white shirt or a shirt with a white
collar. Why? Because it’s flattering, that’s why. Because you can’t wear
a turtleneck all the time, or even a lot of the time—that’s the tragedy of the
turtlenecks—but you can always wear white to the face. And because when
you wear white to the face, the light is always shining on you…As it is right
now, at the Dune Deck—the sun is shining on my father. He is wearing a polo
shirt and khaki shorts and Nike sneakers and white socks. He is retired, and
has been for nearly ten years. He has two major complaints, each of which is
long-standing: one, that he is “shrinking,” and two, that he is losing his
hair, or rather, losing his hair at a race in excess of the rate at which he
was losing his hair when he first started complaining about losing his hair,
which was at the very least thirty-five years ago. We are drinking cocktails,
and our faces are in the sun. “OK, Dad,” I say, “what are some of the rules a
man should remember when he’s getting dressed?”

“Well,
always try to wear white to the face,” my father says automatically, repeating
a motto, a chant, a mantra my brother, Michael, and I have heard, say a
thousand times in the course of our lives, usually when we have worn something other
than white to the face, and have been accused of thereby “disfiguring”
ourselves. “Particularly if you’re tan. Gray is the worst color you can wear.
Don’t ever wear a gray shirt. Gray or brown.”

“I
have a gray shirt,” I say.

“You
do? Never wear it.” Then, after a moment’s reflection, during which my father
almost winces, in order to set his teeth for the impeccable rendering of his
final judgment: “Burn it.”

4.
Make sure to show plenty of cuff.

I
bring a Calvin Klein blazer to the Dune Deck to wear at night, and when I show
the jacket to my father, I make a confession: “Dad, I think the sleeves are a
little long.”

They
work, my father’s fashion tips. That’s what’s funny about them, besides the
fact that they are…well, funny in the first place. They work, or they worked,
for him, for my father. They were cohesive and complementary; they spoke in a
single voice; they were his manifesto. Take a look, for example, at a picture
of my father standing in a group of his fellow salesmen at a Bar Mitzvah circa
1962. Take a look at the one man whose jacket sleeves cover his shirt cuffs,
like the sleeves of a cassock. He does not look merely glum or sour; he looks
defeated, whipped, scared, precancerous—a recessive man, with a receding
hairline. Now take a look at my father, holding in one pinkie-ringed hand a
drink and a cigarette. He is about 43 years old, and, by God, he is glistening,
for he is in his prime, and all the elements are in place. He has a fresh burn,
and he is wearing a shirt with a high collar. He is wearing a suit of midnight
blue, single-breasted, with a silver tie and a handkerchief in the pocket (I’ve
never heard him call it a “pocket square”), which he does not fold into
regimental points but rather simply “throws in there,” so that what shows is
just “a puff.” He is undoubtedly wearing bikini underwear, for anybody who
wears boxer shorts is “a square” or “a farmer,” as in, “What are you, a
farmer?”; and he is undoubtedly wearing socks, or “hose,” that go “over the
calf, knee-high,” for if there’s anything he hates more than long sleeves on a
suit jacket, it’s “ankle socks,” because “I can’t stand to see someone sitting down
with their ankles showing—their white ankles and their black socks.”

His
shirt has French cuffs, of course, and he’s showing plenty of them—“at least an
inch”—and he looks sharp… and by sharp I mean avid, by sharp
I mean almost feral, by sharp I mean that if this were not a Bar Mitzvah
but rather a meeting of the Five Families, when the schnorrer in the
long sleeves and the boxer shorts and the ankle socks would be the guy fingered
for a rubout, and the guy showing plenty of cuff would be the man commissioned
for the kill. 1962: a good time for sharp dressers. 1962: Even the freaking president
is a sharp dresser, and he’s just about the same age as my father, and as for
him, as for Lou Junod, well, he’s still coming on, and if he looks, in
this picture, slightly dangerous, in his own proud display, I also have no
doubts that on this resplendent day he was one of the most beautiful men in the
world.

“I
didn’t grow up with any of the disadvantages,” my father says at the Dune Deck.
“I didn’t have any money; I didn’t have any brains—all I had was my looks and
my charisma.” Yes, that’s right: His fashion tips worked because they had to
work—because he had nothing else. No education to speak of, and no religion
worth naming; no father (his father was a briny, bingeing drunk, and whenever
any of us mentioned him, whenever any of us used the words “your father,” Dad
was quick to correct us: “I had no father”); not even any history (to
this day, I have no idea when my father’s forebears came to this country or who
they were or where they came from).

He came out of nowhere, thirteen pounds at
birth, born to a great, kindly bawdy woman who played piano in the pits of
silent-movie houses. So he was big from the start, Big Lou, but that’s all he
was, and so he had to just keep getting bigger—for my father, it was celebrity
or bust. His mentors, his teachers, his influences—they weren’t men;
they were gorgeous silvered shadows, dancing across movie screens…and by the
time he was 16 or 17, he was singing their songs, blanching the Brooklyn from
his voice on the way home from the theater, and he was dressing like them, or
trying to, anyway, and so was everybody else. That’s the most amazing thing
about listening to my father’s stories of his coming of age—the sheer aspiration
in them, and how easily it was shared and passed around; the way so many
of them begin with my father and one of his rivals squaring off for a fight
over a girl and end with the two of them recognizing each other before
they ever come to blows and then going off somewhere to talk about clothes,
of all things, and about style, and about class, and to argue over who was the
better dresser, Fred Astaire or Cary Grant or Walter Pidgeon. My father
believed, absolutely, in the old saw, at once terrifying and liberating, that
“clothes make the man,” and so did his friends, and so everything they wore had
to tell a story, and the story had to be about them, because otherwise,
the world was never going to hear it. That’s really my father’s first fashion
tip, come to think of it: that everything you wear has to add up, that
everything has to make sense and absolutely f’ing signify.

He did not
come up in the current culture of corporate individualism, so he could not let
himself off the hook by wearing some fucking T-shirt that says NIKE on the
front or CHICAGO BULLS; he has never been able to understand the utility of
dressing, intentionally, like a slob, nor to discern what preference a
heterosexual man is advertising when he wears an earring. “What do they mean?”
he asks of earrings. “I’ve asked, and I’ve never gotten a good answer. Do they
mean that you’re a swinger? Do they mean that you’re free?
Nobody’s ever been able to tell me….”

Irony?
Irony is no answer, because in my father’s view a man is not allowed irony in
the wearing of clothes. Irony is for women, because for them clothes are all
about play, all about tease and preamble—because for them dressing is
all about undressing. For a man, though, clothes both determine and mark his
place in the world; they are about coming from nakedness, rather than
going to it—and so irony spells diminution, because irony says that you
don’t mean it…and you have to mean it. You have to mean what you wear.
Hell, my father remembers what he wore at just about every important moment in
his life, and even at moments of no importance at all—moments whose only
meaning derived from the fact that my father was wearing clothes worth
remembering; moments when it might have seemed to my father that the clothes on
his back and the sincere force with which he wore them were enough to deliver
him where he wanted to go: “You know, I used to walk on a cloud when I
walked down Fifth Avenue and went to La Grenouille for lunch. Like I owned
it, you know? I remember one day I met [a fellow salesman, named Joel] with his
wife. I was wearing a beige glen-plaid suit—beautiful—and a shirt with a white
collar, with a silk grenadine tie and a set of nice cuff links, and Joel’s wife
said, ‘Joel, I never saw anything like it. Look at the way these women are
carrying on over Lou. Every place we go. It’s unbelievable.’ And it was. It
really was. And I used to feel so good, I couldn’t believe it—and that was
enough to satisfy me. I didn’t have to go any further with it. And whatever
aspirations I had of being theatrical, of being in show business, I was—I
was.”

5.
The better you look, the more money you make.

There
is a woman at the Dune Deck with a dark tan and long black hair and a block of
brilliant white teeth. “My God,” my father says, “what teeth! Those are the
most beautiful teeth I’ve ever seen in the flesh.” Now, I must say that I’ve
heard this before, that this is not a particularly unusual utterance
from the mouth of my father, because my father has a white fetish—as evidenced
by his white cars, white pants, white collars, white marble steps, etc.—and on
top of his white fetish he has a teeth fetish, so white teeth move him greatly,
often in the direction of hyperbole, in regard to both women and men. For
instance, a couple of years ago, I went to a baseball game in Atlanta with my
parents and ran into a friend of mind named Vince. “My God, what teeth he had!”
my father said when we got back to our seats. “Those are the most beautiful
teeth I’ve ever seen in a man.” He has also been known to ask, flat out, upon
first meeting someone, “Are those your teeth? Jesus, if I’d had teeth like
yours…”

My father does not have
great teeth, nor do I. Oh sure, has white teeth now, but as he says, “Those are
all money; those are all work.” Back when he was singing, he was very
self-conscious about his dingy choppers, and he often wonders now whether his
teeth were what prevented him from going as far as he could have gone in show
business. And as for my teeth…well, I was sick a lot when I was a kid and ran a
lot of fevers and took a lot of medicines, and so it’s like someone lit a Magic
Snake in my mouth—my teeth are an efflorescence of sulfur and carbon and ash.
My mouth is forever in the shadows, and so it is no surprise to me, when we go
back to our room at the hotel, my father and I, and lie together on his bed,
staring at a ceiling slovenly with unsealed seams, that my father says, as he
has said so many times before, “Do you mind if I ask you a question? You can
tell me to mind my business, but when are you going to get your teeth fixed?
What are you waiting for? You’re in the entertainment business now, son—the better
you look, the more money you make. Will you listen to your old man for once?
The better you look, the more money you make. The better you look,
the more money you make.

I don’t tell him what I
realize, at precisely this moment, in answer to his aphorism—that I have chosen
to make a living out of printed words for the very purpose of transcending
my dim teeth, my shadowed mouth. And I don’t tell him, because, for my father,
there is no possibility of transcendence: He is attached to his teeth, and attached
to his body, and attached to his clothes, in a way that I have never been
attached to mine. He has nothing else now, except his family, which has become
everything to him, while I have this, this urge not to sing but to
somehow speak and tell…except that of course in the end writing is the
same as wearing clothes: You do it to have some say over how you look to
the world, and you wind up revealing precisely what you’ve hidden, and more
than you will ever know.

“Dad, what’s the best
you’ve ever looked?” I ask him that night at dinner. “I mean, the precise
moment when you looked your best.” I figure that he will know the answer to
this one. I figure that he will talk about the Bar Mitzvah in 1962, or walking
down Fifth Avenue to La Grenouille, or coming down the stairs at El Morocco and
feeling like “a bride at her wedding,” or the night he sang to close a club in
Dallas and Zsa Zsa Gabor danced in lonely circles in front of the microphone…I
figure that there will be a single instant when the world opened up to him and
that it will be emblazoned upon his memory. But, no—there is no single
instant, and when my father answers my question it is without hesitation: “The
best I ever looked? Every day of my life. People will think I’m crazy, but I
mean it. I felt like a celebrity every day of my life. I looked so good,
I never wanted to go to bed.”

We
have the best table in the house, at the restaurant located within the Dune
Deck, which is named after its chef, Starr Boggs, and which, by the way, is
excellent—or, in my father’s appraisal, elegant. We are sitting at a
corner table, by a window through which you can see the black and white of the
ocean and hear its yawn and sizzle and splat, and my father is wearing a yellow
polo shirt, white ducks, brown loafers and a white zippered windbreaker with
epaulets. I am wearing khakis and a white button dress shirt, with its collar
unbuttoned, and the Calvin Klein blazer, which my father asked me not to wear
when we were getting dressed for dinner: “You’re not going to wear a jacket,
are you? Aw, c’mon Tommy—I didn’t pack one because I didn’t think we’d need
one. You’re going to make me look bad.” Then he went downstairs to get a
drink at the bar before dinner, and as soon as he left the room I put the
blazer on and didn’t take it off. I wasn’t trying to make my father look bad or
show him up, but, hell, it was my genetic destiny to wear that jacket
and I was ready to claim it. And besides, I had a little glow, and I was
wearing white to the face, and I left the cuffs of my shirt unbuttoned in order
to show them off, and I have to admit that I looked pretty fucking good.
“Look at you, you son of a bitch,” my father said when I walked into the bar.
“You look handsome—handsome! You see what a little color can do? But you have
to work on it. You should forget that natural stuff and try to get a little sun
whenever you can. That natural stuff doesn’t cut it anymore—it’s not
very in….”

Does
my father look handsome on this night, at the best table in the house? He does;
he does, indeed. And now, to tell him so, here come the women. Or, I should
say, the woman—in this case, a woman about my father’s age, whose face
is etched with lines of runic complexity and who is wearing a visor that says
ROYAL VIKING PRINCESS and enormous square eyeglasses and a white-on-blue
polka-dotted jacket over a blue-on-white polka-dotted dress: a peppy, strapping
old gal who limps over to our table on a four-pronged cane and says, “Tell me,
did you two get the best table in the house because you’re so good-looking, or
do you know the owner?” Then she looks at my father and introduces herself:
“Clara. Clara Straus. As in Johann….” Then she leaves, to no music, and we
order our food, and when I choose our wine, my father—who is watching me, who
is always watching—says, “You’ve got style, kid; you’ve got style.” His eyes
draw fire and color from drink, and now they focus, with an intense effrontery,
on the table behind me. “There’s an actress over there, and I forget her name.
begins with an l. Very famous.” I turn around for a second and see a
tiny, dark-haired woman with an even tinier head, a woman who is at once
exquisite and insectoid, and who is so perfectly composed that she seems to
turn all movement into a tremble.

“Susan
Lucci,” I say.

“That’s
right, that’s right,” my father says. “Is that her? Your mother doesn’t like
her, you know. Not a lot of women do. She’s the kind of woman that men like and
women don’t.”

Can
she keep her eyes of my father? I don’t know, because for the remainder of the
meal my back stays to her. But he can’t keep his eyes off her, that’s for sure;
and at one point, he dips his chin, and as he scrutinizes her he strikes a pose
of suave regard.

“Dad,
what are you doing?”

“Trying
to catch her eye,” he says.

“Well,
is it working?”

“She’s
weakening, my son,” my father says. “She’s weakening.”

*****

We
stay at the bar after we finish our meal because my father wants to drink
grasshoppers (“You’ve never had a grasshopper? They were the in
drink at one time”) but mainly because he doesn’t want the night to end. “I
don’t have to tell you how much this means to me,” he says, with his brown,
mottled hand around my wrist. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a place
like this—with a crowd like this.” Yes, my father is part of the crowd
again, part of the crowd of hustlers and jostlers and guys coming on, of
cigar smokers and martini drinkers and a woman in a silvery blue cocktail dress
who is, in my father’s estimation, “stacked”…and so the lessons never stop.
“Dad, what do you think about that guy turning up his collar under his blazer?”
“You father did that fifty years ago.” “Dad, what do you think of
band-collared shirts?” “I’d war a band-collared shirt—to bed. They look
like pajamas. The worst is when they’re worn with tuxedos. I can’t stand that.
They look like the dirty undershirt Dean Martin wore in Rio Bravo.”

He
falls asleep, in his clothes, the moment we get back to the room. He snores,
with his fingers folded on top of his navel, and I take off my shoes and walk
down to the ocean, in my blazer and khakis, under a black seam that splits the
spangled sky and vaults out into the ocean forever. The only excuse for a
man to grow a beard is if he has a weak chin or acne—that’s what I know
from my father. Make sure to splash some cologne on your privates—that’s
another thing. Never wear navy blue and black—that’s what I came to know
on the morning of my wedding, when I wore a navy blue suit and black shoes, and
my father said, “What are you—a policeman?” (“But Dad, what kind of
shoes should you wear?” “With a navy blue suit? Navy blue shoes.”) As
for the rest…as for everything else…not what I know of him—that’s
harder, of course, because, well, why do you wear clothes in the first place,
if not to cover up? I mean, Adam and Eve found that quick
enough—that clothes are totems of simultaneous confession and disguise. They
are masks that unmask you, and what I knew of my father, through his clothes,
was this: that he was going out. That he was going away.

That he was heading
for Miami or Atlanta or Dallas…that he was dressing for other people, an
audience somewhere; that he was dressing for Frank and Ava and Dino and Liz and
Zsa Zsa; that he was dressing for the world; that he belonged to
the world as much as he belonged to us, and we had to let him go. Let him go—that’s
what my mother always said when my father was going out, and a few months ago,
when I visited one of our old next-door neighbors, this is what she told me: “I
remember one day your father was flying south, and he had a black tan,
and he was wearing a white Bill Blass jumpsuit with a zipper, and I said
to myself, ‘This is the most gorgeous creature I’ve ever seen.’ And I said to
your mother, ‘Fran, are you going to let this man out like this?’ And
your mother said, ‘Ah, let him go. Let him go.’ ”

And then he came back. He always came back, to tell
us what he had seen and what he had found out. He always had news, my
father did—he always had the scoop, about who had the smile, who had the
handshake, who had the toup. He always told me what I needed to know
about the world…and the world told me what I needed to know about him—that,
yes, indeed, he owned it. He was a terror, my father, when I was
young—he was hell-bent on mastery, and for years I was afraid of him…the sheer
booming size of him. Then, for a long time, I idolized him, until I realized,
not very long ago, that I have spent my entire life moving toward him. See, my
father doesn’t belong to the world anymore—he’s given it up, or it’s given him
up, or it’s just flat gone, like our beach house down the road. His world is no
bigger now than his family, and he doesn’t even have to dress for it. But
certain things still belong to him, and now, here I am, standing on the
beach in the dark, with a $700 jacket on my back and my trousers rolled and my
father snoring back in the room, and I’m stepping into the ink of the
ocean—because just as the ocean inn Westhampton will always be his, his
secrets will always be his secrets. Lou Junod: He was determined to make his
mark, and God, he did, and now, as I walk into my life I walk into his,
into the gift he gave me, his first and final fashion tip: the knowledge that a
man doesn’t belong to anyone. That he belongs to his secrets. That his
secrets belong to him.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

LFG
picked out my little British Racing Green Mini Cooper-S convertible almost two
years ago and it’s been a blast to drive. Really. Would it serve better as a
second car? A weekend roundabout and a tool-around buggy for the back roads
around Middleburg and The Plains? I believe that’s when it best preens its
Go-Kart capabilities. Otherwise, it’s a bit small for a daily driver. Good news
is that I generally don’t drive far and wide when I’m home. The car is just not that practical.

And God
only knew that I would be driving my Mini back and forth home to Florence with
the regularity that I have since February 3rd. I’ve been home more
since February 3rd than in the previous three years combined. My
mom, by the way…the eighty-three year old gal who was on a respirator and whose
departure was announced hourly for the first month…the gal who one of the most
skilled and communicative surgeons…the guy who did emergency surgery on her at
two in the morning, said wouldn’t come off the table alive…spent a half-hour
outside of the rehab hospital soaking up the sunshine the other day. She also
shot my baby brother the “bird.” I have much to share about my mom and this odyssey
that we’ve all been on with her. I think I need to start another blog to take
on the gravity of it though. Stay tuned…or not. I don’t care.

I stole most of these photos from Daddy's and Dextros's tumblrs. Without permission. Shut the...

And this
used to be a blog about clothes. You remember, right? Texture, color, fuzziness
and whatnot. So why don’t I throw sumpin on this drivel pile that’d be true to
what I used to drone about with some regularity. Let me tell you about
Coffman’s Menswear in Greenville, N.C. and my two buddies who preen around the
joint with country-ass aplomb. I’ve been humbled by and amazed at the eclectic
goods and high caliber tastiness of Coffman’s. That's Daddy, above. He's fuzzy even when he ain't feeling well.

Daddy,
the sartorial fuzzier than me to the point of no-return hirsute-tootiness and
his understudy, whose real name is Hog Farmer John but who I’ve dubbed Dextrose
are the collective Forrest Gump of Eastern Carolina haberdashdom. Dextrose in his Tom Wolfe-Thumbian getup above, dates a hottie by the way. Shut up.

Let me
touch on the humbled by Coffman’s thing. Karma demands that I admit to getting
years ago, way above my raisin’. I’m the progeny of Scotch-Irish Carolinians
who spent the first century over here scrounging like most of ‘em did, eking
out an agrarian subsistence. But in the mid nineteenth century, tobacco changed
everything. And there was money in that crop, let me tell you. Big money. So
both sides of my family became tobacco farmers way back then. I’ve told the
story about my dad swearing from moment one that he’d get the hell off the farm
and he did. And this set the stage for me to fly even farther from the nest and
see the world and get a fair amount of high falutin education and to get, well,
high-minded.

So when
I began to see tumblr snippets here and there about this joint called Coffman’s,
I was skeptical After all, I’ve spent time and money in most of the pantheon
caliber haberdasheries remaining in the States and quite a few in Europe. Greenville,
N.C.? Really? Are there that many hog and peanut farmers left with the dosh to
pop for such things? And who the hell down there has the taste level to
appreciate it even if they could afford it? Tobacco by the way…ain’t what it
used to be. The Department of Agriculture pays us not to grow it. I get a check
once a year—unfortunately it’s divided among a zillion cousins—for about enough
dough to make a down payment on a pair of Cleverley’s. Shut up.

Might my
high-mindedness be considered reverse provincialism? How stupid can I really
be? Greenville, N.C. is a healthcare destination…teaching hospitals and a
medical school with great repute. I suppose that being so close to Duke and all
its marquee caliber healthcare provision causes one to not think of Greenville
as a healthcare town per se. And there’s East Carolina University. Bottom line
is that it was pretty pig headed of me to write off Greenville and Coffman’s as
sartorial wasteland. My hometown of Florence can’t carry Greenville’s water.
And Florence hasn’t had a decent haberdashery in over twenty-five years now.

My first
purchase from Daddy and Hog Farmer-D was my 2013 Bill’s GTH togs. I still hadn’t
set foot in the store but I figured that if these guys could source such
thangs, I’d just phone order my damn self a pair of size 33 extra charming
older than fifty-years Peter Pan man britches. But then I stopped by to see the
boys and the store when I went home just after Christmas. The joint is legit.

So I
stopped in again to see Daddy and Dextrose on the way down to Florence the
other week and pounced on a couple more tasty thangs. Wispy thin linen pocket
square was a keeper for certain. There was something about its attenuated
delicateness that whispered—yes—whispered…“take
my ass home…take my ass home.” And amazingly, it whispered it in a three-in-the-morning,
Roxanne Burgess, circa 1980 at the Kappa Alpha house voice. So who was I to say
no?

And then
Daddy hoodwinked me into believing that there was some kinda legitimacy to this
Carolina Tartan come-on. My people only began wearing burlap kilts from feed
sacks back in 1893. We ain’t got no tartan. I remain skeptical about the tartan
legitimacy but not about the belt. I wore it every day all day all week and am
probably gonna wear it when I hit the mean streets of D.C. tonight. Shut up.

Last but
not least is this Peter Millar linen fuzz thang. I’m set with solid color linen
shirts but this one had my name on it. Well not literally but you know what I
mean. I’ve never owned a Peter Millar anything and don’t see myself becoming a
devotee but this one had balance. Balance you ask? Yep. Fuzzy enough without
being over the top GTH in a Liberty of London kinda way. If you need further
clarification on what I’m conveying here, please, ask someone else.

But
these cats do even tastier things. After seeing Daddy’s horizontal contrivances
from the Carmel atelier of Robert Talbot, I had him cook one up for me. We
simply did a stock size with a tweak or two and it came out perfect. Over the
fuzzy top, actually. The ADG jury remains out regarding how the Carmel chemise
will ultimately compare to what Gambert turns out in N.J. for Flusser and
Rykken but I can say that they’ve got Individualized beat all to be damned.

But that
ain’t all, folks. There’s also the subject of popovers. Yes, popovers…the
quirky trad throwback shirt that’s rare these days…rare at least from the
perspective of finding one that’s “right.”
I discovered one in the trad store that I worked in during college and had no
idea what it was. It had slipped behind a display counter and had hovered there
between the counter and the wall for over twenty years. I think nowadays people
call something like this new-old stock.
You know, like the togs we all went crazy for at O’Connell’s three summers ago.

A few months ago, Daddy started showing off popover swatches. The
boy is rapier efficient with his iPad. He shoots a few photos of swatches and
before you know it, guys like little ADG are American Expressing themselves.
Popping all over. Shut up.

So let
me close out this drivel and get hopping. I’m Gotham bound in the morning and
then over to New Jersey on Monday afternoon for two delightfully billable days.
Then it’s back home to take delivery of a five-thousand dollar HVAC system for
Casa Minimus. There’s no joy in spending 5k on something that admittedly makes
you feel comfortable yet isn’t something you can take photos of and blog
stories about it saying …“look at me…look
at me…I spent five grand on this sh_t.” But wait till you see what the Coffman's boys are making me from this card. Bam.

Onward. Still holding on to my mama. Humbled. Horizontalled. And Popped.